A typical area of application of such analysis devices or analyzers lies in the field of medicine/diagnostics where such devices are used, for example, for the analysis of body fluids, in particular for blood analysis.
Such analyzers are frequently used for the decentralized determination of point-of-care (POC) parameters, for example, of blood gases (O2, CO2, pH), electrolytes (K+, Na+, Ca++, Cl−), metabolites (glucose and lactate), haematocrit, haemoglobin parameters (tHb, SO2, etc.) and bilirubin. In most cases, human whole blood serves here as a sample material, but applications in veterinary medicine and the use of serum, plasma, urine and dialysate samples are possible as well.
Such analyzers comprise appropriate measuring elements and arithmetic units associated therewith such as, e.g., programmable microcomputers or also application-specific circuits which control the functions of the analyzers and, accordingly, form a control stage. Furthermore, the analyzers comprise memory units (e.g., a 2.5″ hard disk as a primary data storage device), which are also referred to as an internal memory medium. With the aid of those units, all settings (configuration data) as well as measuring results (measured data), user data and patient and subject data, respectively, (also those modifiable by a user) are usually stored internally. Possibly, some of these data can be exported upon request into other systems or onto other data storage devices and, respectively, can be imported from other systems or from other data storage devices. Standard protocols such as ASTM E 1394, 91 or POCT1-A or HL7 exist for data exchange with laboratory and hospital information systems or various server/client-based data and device management systems.
The problem of exchanging data in an electrochemical analysis device is also addressed in the German utility model specification DE 201 13 153 U1. In order to permit the exchange of data in an easy manner, a data reading and writing unit comprising an alternate semiconductor memory card is disclosed there as a solution. In the known case, the data reading and writing unit and the card replace an interface for the transmission of measured data and device parameters via a respective communication network to a central data processing station.
At this point, it should furthermore be mentioned that a process for backing up and restoring data in connection with a PC is disclosed in US 2006/0294420 A1. Such a data backup is usually executed in a time-controlled manner or is triggered manually. In this process, configuration data which are required for restoring the saved data are treated separately from the data to be saved in order to retrieve those configuration data more easily in case the data are restored.
Furthermore, at this point, US 2006/0148463 A1 should also be indicated in which the malfunction of a mobile phone is addressed, with the malfunction of the mobile phone having been caused mainly by incorrect or defective settings. In this context, their object is to restore original settings. Their object is achieved by a monitoring module which saves a plurality of original settings as soon as a SIM card is inserted in a mobile phone and restores the original settings if the settings of the mobile phone do not correspond to the original settings.
Neither the above-mentioned protocols nor the previously discussed disclosures in the patent and utility model literature solve the inherent problems of the data transfer in known analyzers. These data transfer methods, which have been used so far, exhibit in particular the following disadvantages:                Manual interventions are necessary (e.g., selecting the data, starting the backup application).        In case of necessity, a manual backup process normally implies a loss of data, since the data export is not performed immediately before the occurrence of an equipment failure.        Possibly, separate coding and decoding of backup data is necessary.        Solutions implemented in hardware (printer controller, disc controller, partially separate processors and interfaces to storage media) are normally expensive.        